We decided that, before Tim left to go back to school, we should make one more dinner. This time, on August 13th (almost a month after our last full meal), we decided to go all out—which means a table cloth, perfectly aligned settings and every course imaginable (except for soup…). We decided to make a chicken and pasta bake, which I have made before with some friends at the Ronald McDonald House. In addition to that, we found a recipe for a spinach salad with sesame dressing. To our meal, we added dinner rolls and a mint tea punch. For dessert, we decided on profiteroles, which are basically cream puffs with ice cream instead of cream.
We went shopping on the 12th, which is always an exciting adventure. We scouted out everything that we needed, except for lemon juice. We solved that issue by buying lemons and squeezing them ourselves. We even got to check ourselves out, which is always fun! I spent some time last night going through the recipes and organizing a timetable for when we should start each separate piece so that we could end up with a hot dinner at around 6:30.
Continue reading ‘Chicken Pasta Bake, Salad, Rolls, Mint Tea and Profiteroles’
On July 19th, Tim and I made food for ourselves, while Mom and Dad were at the neighbor’s house for dinner. We decided to make our own pizza which has apples, cheese, chicken and onions.
Our first adventure was to make a crust for the pizza. Now, we’re good at making pie crusts, but a pizza crust is a completely different thing. It turned out to be not as much trouble as people made it out to be, but trying to figure out how to cook it so that the crust didn’t burn, but the top bits got cooked enough was interesting.
Tim cooked the chicken (as always) and I cut up the apple and onions. We piled that on the semi-baked crust. Then we poured on the cheddar cheese and attempted to do the same with the pepper jack cheese. See, we couldn’t find any shredded pepper jack, or a bar of it. So we bought slices. And then we had to shred it. We tried to use the large grater, but that failed. So Tim used the spinning hand held cheese grater—which worked perfectly. With all of our ingredients on the top, we put the pizza in to cook for another 10 minutes. When it came out, it was just browning and smelled great.
The pizza was excellent. We cut it up in to 9 pieces, and had it for lunch the next day as well. It tasted great and was quite simple to make. The crust worked extremely well and the apple/cheese combination is really good.
We had some frozen shrimp in the freezer that needed to be eaten, so Tim and I took that on as our next cooking challenge. We found a recipe for Ancho Shrimp with Smoked Gouda Corncakes that would use up the shrimp, and be something other than chicken, which seems to be all we make. We also baked some chocolate white chip cookies and made a Orange Cream Punch as our drink.
After searching for ancho peppers, ancho chile pepper or some spice that could be a substitute, we struck gold at Shaw’s. We walked into the store, picked up lettuce for salad and basically walked into the pepper section, which just happened to have dried ancho peppers. With that most important ingredient, we set to work.
Continue reading ‘Shrimp & Corncakes and Chocolate White Chip Cookies’
Hello again! We made food again tonight, July 11th. I got this crazy idea to make chicken and rice stuffed peppers, which is what we decided to make tonight. In addition, we made buttery lemon spinach, an orange juice/lemonade/iced tea drink known as Tiger Tea and a brownie ice cream sandwich cake dessert.
We started by making the dessert, because it took the longest and had to be frozen a few times. The first step was to make the brownie layers, which were easy to mix and bake. Those had to cool for a while, and then the ice cream center was added. It took a bit of effort to get the brownie out of one of the pans, which made everything a little more difficult. And the ice cream layer, which had to be level, was interesting because we had to slice the ice cream in layers, and had to keep melting it in the oven for a few seconds at a time. In the end, it was alright, the brownie part wasn’t great, and it was really messy.
Continue reading ‘Stuffed Peppers, Spinach and Sandwiches’
Hi, Amy again, writing before we embark on our next fooding adventure tomorrow! On June 28, Tim and I made an attempt at a classic Utica/Rome, NY recipe called chicken riggies. It’s basically chicken and pasta (penne in our case, though rigatoni is suggested) in a creamy tomato sauce. It’s kind of odd to think of and explain, but it was actually quite great. The most hilarious bit during cooking this was the sauce. When you let it settle, it turned white, but when you stirred it, it turned bright orange. Absolutely awesome. We skipped the cooking sherri, which was fine, but I think rigatoni would have been better.
In addition, we made some cheese bread —simply a cut up loaf of Italian bread, buttered and spread with mozzarella cheese. Then the bread was baked it for about 3 minutes, and it was nice and warm and delicious.
Our chocolate chip ice cream pie was excellent. The crust, which I had to make again, was crushed mini chocolate chip cookies. There was a ring of cookies around the edge. The crust was covered in melted vanilla ice cream. We stopped there, and decided not to follow the next step which said to wait 2 hours, then add more ice cream. We just put a ton of ice cream on the first time and froze that. This was definitely a dessert we would make again!
Overall, a very good dinner that was semi quick and simple.
Hi, it’s Amy again! Our first attempt at making a full dinner together happened around June 17. After going through about a thousand recipes, I compiled a menu for a complete dinner.
The main dish was called Southwestern Chicken Salad—a combination of salad, baked flour tortillas, chicken, corn, black beans and tomatoes. The dressing was a mix of barbeque sauce and ranch dressing. It was very simple and good for the most part, though the beans and tomatoes were rather excessive.
The corn bread muffins we made from scratch came from this recipe. They were quick and easy, but we learned that you should use Pam, not muffin papers. Also, the recipe we used, which we found after we went shopping, used only things we already had.
Continue reading ‘Southwestern Chicken Salad Plus Sides’
Hi! I’m Amy and I’m going to be writing about the food adventures that Tim and I are taking over this summer.
After Tim made his fudge, we decided to take on a peanut butter and fudge pie on June 11th. After we found the recipe, we secretly biked to Mazza’s and picked up the graham crackers, cream and evaporated milk that we needed.
The first thing to do was figure out how to make a crust out of the graham crackers. That turned out to be my job, and it was quite an experience. When I made the crust, I used the wrong pan, which was too small and made the pie rather tall.
Meanwhile, Tim made more fudge that we used to make a layer between the crust and the peanut butter. Again, he complained about the candy thermometer, which I finally understand. He had to use a cup of water and try to sink the little fudge drops. He layered in the fudge, while I whipped the cream with a whisk—which wasn’t easy, but made a great topping.
Continue reading ‘Peanut Butter and Fudge Pie’
Amy and I have decided we’re going to make things more often (cooking/baking/whatever) especially since Mom always does all of the cooking, and that we should write about it somewhere, and keep a list of recipes that seem to have worked. So I’m going to add that as a new thing here… this blog is completely doing-it-wrong, a random assortment of literally everything, but if you don’t want something, don’t subscribe to that category! 
The random cooking this summer started with peanut butter fudge I made, around March 28th. It worked out well, though a candy thermometer would probably have made it a bit easier. I don’t have any pictures, sadly, but I’d say it was pretty good. It’s possible that making it without chunky peanut butter would have been a better idea, too (whoops!)…
